The Florians. Brian Stableford
really want to find something like that, don’t you?” she said. “A magic formula. Something to save the entire colony concept, renew the whole effort.”
I studied her carefully. She had a hard, bony face, framed by white-blond hair which grew wild all around it. She was thirty-some, and didn’t look as if she’d done a lot of smiling in her life. Her sense of humor was decidedly acid. I liked her.
“OK,” I said. “So I would. If there were such a thing to be found. But I’m not an idiotic optimist. I believe in the colony project even if there is no magic formula. I think we should keep trying, in spite of setbacks. I think we’ve done what we can with Earth. We have to move on to new levels of ambition.”
I almost expected her to sneer, but she didn’t. “A lot of people think that kind of talk is poison,” she commented.
“Not out here,” I said.
“Don’t bet on it.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said,” she muttered tersely.
She couldn’t be talking about the colonists—she had to be thinking evil thoughts about someone on the strength. So who was on board to play devil’s advocate? Nathan? She wasn’t going to say. Maybe she was talking about herself. Maybe she meant to imply nothing more than the fact that other people didn’t quite have my deep-seated conviction about the rightness of it all.
“It’ll be dark pretty soon,” she said, changing the subject.
The sun was squatting on the horizon, but twilight might last some time. She wasn’t trying to pick an argument, though...just putting things back together again.
“No point in taking a long walk,” I said. “They haven’t got street lights yet. Maybe they’re waiting till they have streets.”
“It wouldn’t be very romantic anyhow,” she said, with the irony back at full force. “Not without a moon.”
“That’s one hell of an old joke,” I said. “And it wasn’t ever funny.”
“Don’t take it to heart,” she said.
I suddenly felt slightly embarrassed, as though the sarcasm were directed specifically at me, instead of just coming naturally. I moved away reflexively, and then turned the movement into a first strolling step back in the direction of the hall.
“Maybe they’re missing us,” I said. “It might be your turn to make a speech.”
“Sure,” she countered. “I’d be a big hit. Every single dirty joke that’s been made up back home in the last two hundred years will be new to these guys.”
“Don’t bet on it,” I told her.
CHAPTER TWO
There was a lot of the evening still to be endured. I say “endured” because it really wasn’t my scene at all. I’m not antisocial, but I find humanity en masse something of an embarrassment of riches. I don’t like crowds. Few scientists do. Once you have given over your life to the study of abstract principles governing the behavior of things which have only to be observed, never communicated with, your attitude to your fellow humans begins to change, and keeps on changing. A gap opens up between you, and no matter how close you stand to other people there’s an intangible distance forbidding a complete meeting of the minds. The distancing effect is even worse, of course, when the fellow human in question is one with whom you have nothing in common...not even a cultural background. In such instances, it is far too easy for said fellow human to become another thing to be observed, to be placed in a context of abstract and generalized principles rather than a context of social interaction.
I have to confess that I could only watch the Florians from within. I could not reach out and join them. I could not enjoy the social occasion that they had concocted for our benefit, despite the fact that they were friendly. I didn’t, as Karen had suggested, find them disgusting...but there is something intimidating about men who tower over you by a full foot when, throughout your life, you have thought of yourself as a tall man.
Nathan Parrick, however, seemed to be in his element. It wasn’t difficult to imagine his life on Earth consisting of endless official functions and informal but incredibly important meetings with all manner of VIPs. He talked easily and quickly, with the happy gift of being able to say nothing at all in the nicest possible way.
There were speeches. Nathan’s was excellent, though lacking in dirty jokes. The ones which the farmers’ self-elected leader, Vern Harwin, attempted to deliver were by no means excellent but had a certain ring of sincerity which I found rather comforting. He didn’t tell any dirty jokes either.
They were showing off, of course. (And so were we, in return.) The food and drink which they’d provided was too abundant, and so was the spirit of fellowship. Everybody laughed too loudly, said all the things they thought they ought to say. Everyone felt the need to make an impression.
The farmers didn’t know that other colonies had failed, were in the process of failing. They didn’t know that they were, from our point of view, a great surprise. But they did know—or, at least, they believed—that they were, in their own right, a colossal success. They were proud of themselves and of their world. They loved showing off.
And they felt, somehow, superior to us. They couldn’t conceal it. We were smooth-talking visitors from the parental world (which to them could only be an awesome myth), had arrived in our great black sky-borne cylinder, representatives of a “higher” civilization. And yet they felt superior. Because they were bigger? Or because the memory of Earth that survived within their culture was a memory of a failed world...a world which had lost its way in a history controlled by fortune?
These people were cocksure. They had a wealth of pride. And that made me uneasy...for in every land of milk and honey lurks a rat, and the difference between proud people and humble ones is that the humble ones are aware of the rat before it starts picking their bones.
But they were only farmers. I told myself that. Somewhere in this world would be shrewder men. They would be afraid of us—perhaps they might hate us—but they would be able to tell us what we wanted to know.
Five of us had come to the party. Standing orders required two people to stay with the ship at all times. Rolving had insisted on being one, and somehow it had been agreed that Linda Beck should be the other. After two weeks in transit, no doubt we could all have used a sight of the sky and a breath of air, but a fortnight isn’t an eternity, by any means—which meant, among other things, that the relief at being free from the confining walls of the ship wore off fairly quickly. As the party dragged on, I watched the others wilt, nod began to count the minutes. Only Nathan maintained his front of inexhaustibility.
Conrad seemed to be maintaining himself aloof from it all. He’d drunk a fair amount but he was cold sober. He had a head like concrete—nothing ever threatened his presence of mind. He was fifty, but looked older. He was tall, by Earthly standards, but life was beginning to drain his flesh and he no longer looked strong. His hair was white, and there was something birdlike about him: perhaps the suggestion of the way he held his head to expose his neck, or his uncommonly bright eyes.
He alone, of the team who had gone out with Kilner, had elected to go out again. A five-year turn of duty followed quickly by seven: a punishing sequence. Perhaps he had expected to take Kilner’s place, although I had never detected the slightest sign of resentment in his attitude toward me.
The noise seemed simply to roll around Conrad like the ocean waves around a rock. He was unmoved by it. Karen and I endured it. Mariel, though, seemed at once to be absorbed within it and pained by it. Mariel was fourteen. I couldn’t help thinking of fourteen as being very young...I had, after all, a son some three years older. She seemed to me to have no place aboard the ship, no place in such a venture as ours. And she made me uneasy. I knew, although I had not yet seen any outward evidence of the fact, that her mind was not like mine. She seemed to me far more alien than these men of Floria—or the truly alien creatures of Floria.